Saliva finds success is easy to swallow

You can hear the excitement in Paul Crosby’s voice. The Saliva drummer and his band mates — who perform in Springfield on Sunday night — spent last week doing demo tracks for their upcoming album.

Dru Willis

You can hear the excitement in Paul Crosby’s voice.

The Saliva drummer and his band mates spent last week doing demo tracks for their upcoming album — the band’s seventh, not including a greatest hits compilation.

“We are really charged up about getting back out there and doing the new record and keeping it going,” Crosby said during a recent telephone interview. “Not a lot of rock bands have very much longevity these days. Some do, obviously, but we are very fortunate and very excited. We are just excited that we get to do another record.”
Saliva: "Click Click Boom"

Five of the Memphis, Tenn., band’s studio albums released since 1997 have reached the Billboard magazine charts, and Saliva will issue a greatest hits package (“Going Forward in Reverse”) next month — a sign of a group that has done well in the fickle business of popular music.

Crosby remembers seeing bands put out greatest hits collections when he was a kid and thinking it would be cool to someday be able to do it himself.

“And then when we got a (record) deal — that’s an accomplishment in itself ... and I would never even have imagined that we would have a greatest hits record,” Crosby said. “It’s like a lifelong dream accomplishment that’s coming true. It’s almost an indescribable feeling.”

Saliva isn’t done yet, however. When not touring, the band is working in a Memphis studio doing demo tracks for the next album of original music.

The music is “good ol’ Saliva,” Crosby said, adding it is also “fresh and new and modern.”

“We are not going to retrace the same footsteps we have been doing on the past few records,” he said.

Over the past couple albums, including 2008’s “Cinco Diablo,” the band would write songs in the studio with a producer present.

Not this time.

The band members are going back to the way they did their first two albums “Every Six Seconds” and “Back Into Your System” — albums that produced the hard rock hits “Click Click Boom,” “Your Disease,” “Always” and “Rest in Pieces.” The band will write without a producer’s input.

“We are going back to square one on this one,” Crosby said.

With a greatest hits collection and an album of new music, Saliva plans to be all over the rock music racks at retailers in 2010.

“Have two records come out in the same year, that’s pretty cool,” Crosby said.